


Surrounds, Penetrates, Binds

by htbthomas



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Action, Banter, F/M, Fluff, Slice of Life, Sweet, The Force, Use of The Force for Essential and Non-Essential Reasons, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-06 10:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5413349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/htbthomas/pseuds/htbthomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who says use of the Force must <i>always</i> be of the noblest intent?  Sometimes, it's just part of life; the intent is inherent and the Force follows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surrounds, Penetrates, Binds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach (Llwyden)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llwyden/gifts).



> Thank you to my beta, coltdancer!

1.  
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Hera shouts at his back.

He blocks a blaster bolt with his upraised lightsaber. “Tell me about it!” When you’re trapped in a settlement, and your only way back to your ship is through a squadron of Stormtroopers—you have to get creative. “Better take the long way around!”

He blocks another shot, two, three—as he spins, looking for a way out of the alley. Then he sees it, a window about ten feet up. 

Hera follows his gaze. “What are you thinking?”

Kanan grabs her around the waist. “Just hold on tight.” He leaps, the Force powering him higher than his muscles could have alone, and lands on the ledge of the window. Hera is silent, long used to what he can do. She steps out of his arms and grabs onto the sill. Sometimes he’s not sure how he deserves the trust she has in him, but at times like these, he’s glad for it.

“What now?” she asks.

His answer is to kick in the glass. There’s a shout of fear from inside the room. Kanan ignores it and hollers over his shoulder. “Head for the roof!”

Behind him, Hera assures the occupants that they mean no harm. “But hide!” she tells them, while still keeping close behind.

In the hallway, she grabs him by the arm. “The roof? Are you crazy?”

What was he thinking earlier about trust? “We were trapped down there. Once we’re on the roof I can leap between buildings.” He sprints for the stairwell.

“And get picked off by TIE fighters!” she calls after him. But she follows.

He bursts through the access door onto the roof, and as he hoped, the coast is clear. He shuts down his lightsaber and reattaches it to his belt. “Take my hand!”

She does, her palm warm in his. “We can’t stay up here.” As if in answer, the mechanical scream of a TIE fighter sounds close by. She side-eyes him with her best I-told-you-so look.

“You have a better idea?” he asks, scanning around with both his eyes and his Force-enhanced senses. There are hostiles coming through the building toward them, as well as some below. 

She’s scanning, too. She opens her mouth in an ‘oh’ of hope and then takes off running, still holding his hand. They jump off the roof, Kanan not really knowing where they’ll land, and then he sees it.

A speeder, parked against the side of a building.

He angles their fall just enough to land a few meters away. Hera springs into the seat, and Kanan gets behind, reigniting his lightsaber with a snap-hiss. They take off in an instant, speeding pell-mell through the street, through frightened civilians. They’re safe enough from Hera and Kanan; she’s too good a driver to touch a soul.

A blaster bolt shoots past his shoulder. The civilians are not safe from Stormtroopers, unfortunately. “Can this thing go any faster?” he shouts.

“I’ve got it maxed!” she says, lowering her head to concentrate on the path ahead. “Unless you can ‘Force’ it to lightspeed, we’re just gonna have to outmaneuver them!”

“Doesn’t really work like that!” he says uselessly. She knows that as well as he does. He looks over his shoulder at the Stormtroopers on their tail. They’ve acquired a speeder as well, and they’re catching up. 

Then he has a thought. Maybe he can’t make the speeder go faster, but he can sure slow them down. As they pass by a stack of storage crates, he telekinetically lifts them to crash in front of their pursuers. Every few meters he piles on more debris, making an obstacle course that not even Hera could thread her way through.

She makes a tight turn to the left, then up and around a pillar, whipping them forward with enough centrifugal force to give them an extra burst of speed. They leave the Stormtroopers far behind, and there’s no TIE fighter in sight.

Well, maybe he’s wrong. Hera could fly through anything. 

2.  
“Ughhhh,” Hera moans. She rubs at her left shoulder with a hand. It’s low and Kanan almost doesn’t hear it over the whine of the hyperdrive engines.

He sets down his lightsaber, which he’s been cleaning. It’s amazing just how much dust and grit can get into the nooks and crannies when you’re always visiting frontier worlds. “What’s wrong?”

“Hmm?” She turns her head toward him. “Why would anything be—?” She winces. “Ow.”

“That.” He stands, and walks over to her command chair. “How much does it hurt?”

“More annoying than a buzzing Krek beetle but less painful than slicing my insides open with a rusty beskad.” She cranes her neck slowly to the right to stretch it out.

“So not much, then,” he teases.

She narrows her eyes at him. “Are you going to give me a shoulder rub or not?”

Of course he is, but he can’t help but add, “Is that an order, Captain?”

Her sly smile makes the teasing worth it. “Absolutely. Hop to, soldier.”

His hands dig in immediately, focusing on the left side. As he works, he can feel the knot in her muscles. “This is really tight,” he tells her. “Did you twist it piloting the speeder?”

“Maybe?” Her voice comes out as a creak. “But I’ve done that slingshot move a hundred times in my lifetime.”

He presses the tips of his fingers into the stubborn knot with firm pressure, but not too hard. “Then that’s the problem.”

“What? That I’m getting too old for this?” she shoots back.

He had been going to jokingly say yes, but there’s a tiny thread of worry in her voice. She’s been at this a long time, longer than he has. But he’s not getting any younger either. “Never.” He gives her shoulders a light squeeze. “We’re going to grow old together, blaster and lightsaber, back to back.”

“Promise?” Her voice is soft. 

He bends down to give her a light kiss on the top of the head, but the doors behind them swish open.

“Kanan?” Ezra sounds bored. “I finished those exercises you— Oh.” By the sound of his boots on the deck, he’s backing slowly away.

Kanan straightens up, but doesn’t turn around. “Did you also clean your lightsaber?” 

The shuffle of Ezra’s feet stop. “No…?”

“A good Jedi takes care of his or her tools. Forget that, and you may find it fails you in the heat of battle.”

Ezra sighs. “Yes, Kanan.”

Still not turning, he says, “And clean mine, too, for good measure.”

“But—!”

Kanan floats the lightsaber over, and he can feel it when Ezra plucks it from the air. Then he grumbles and leaves, the door swishing closed behind him again.

“You’re going to trust him with your lightsaber?” Hera asks, her words slow and drawn out. He can feel the muscles losing their tension finally.

“Ha! Of course not. I’ll have to check the whole thing over again myself. But he needs the practice.”

She chuckles. “And it gets him out of your hair.”

“Yes, there is that.” 

Even though he’s mostly massaged the knot out of her muscles, there’s just a tiny little spot eluding his fingers. So he sends just a thread of Force into it, breaking it apart and relaxing it all the way.

“Ahhh,” she sighs, slumping into her chair. “Thank you. I’m tempted to keep trying that move just to get a massage from you every time.”

“Don’t count on it,” he warns her, but they both know he’s all talk.

3.  
Kanan sits cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, clearing his mind. It’s been a long day. Actually, a long day in a long week in an even longer year. He knows, logically, that one day this rebellion will be over, hopefully in their favor, but now? Now it seems as if the work is endless.

Hera lies on her cot on the other side of the room, her breathing whistling softly and steadily in and out. He extends a tendril of awareness toward her, to make sure she’s really resting as deeply as she needs to. No one does more work around her than she, and all without the slightest complaint. She deserves this rest.

The feelings and images he gets back are calm and peaceful, like endless stars stretching for untold parsecs. Good. He lets himself fall farther into his own trance, letting the Force recharge him since sleep isn’t possible right now.

Then he feels a disturbance, a body moving through the corridor with intent. He frowns. Whoever it is better pass right on by. Don’t they know that Hera needs to sleep?

He feels who it is before they can press the intercom button. He rises quickly and opens the door, stepping out into the hall before closing it behind him again. “What, Zeb.”

His hand is still up in the air, finger a few inches from the button. “Oh, I, uh,” he says, rubbing the back of his head with embarrassment. “I didn’t know you were in there.”

“Now you do,” Kanan says, not apologizing. He’d had a feeling that, despite his clear request to the contrary, someone would try to disturb Hera. “What is it?”

“Ah, I was just hoping we could make a detour on the way back to Garel, there’s this item I can only get… on…” Zeb’s words trickle off, perhaps because of the death stare Kanan is giving him.

“And this couldn’t wait because?”

“Because, uh…” Zeb pushes ahead for reasons Kanan can’t fathom. “Because if we don’t course correct now, there won’t be another chance until… um…” He snaps his mouth shut and mumbles, “Never mind.”

Zeb’s barely out of sight—Kanan watches to make sure he doesn’t come back—when Sabine comes wandering from the other direction, her hands full of gadgets. “Hey,” she calls when she sees Kanan, “is Hera up? I wanted to show her—”

“No.” He clips the word. Maybe she’ll get the hint faster than Zeb.

“Then maybe I could—”

“No.” He points down the hallway, the way she came. “It can wait.”

Sabine stops, shrugs. “Fine. I just—”

“Go.”

He doesn’t relax until after she’s not only out of sight but he can’t sense her presence anymore. He opens the door and starts to return to his meditation pose. But not before he notices that Hera is in a different position than before—oh no, did the dolts in the hallway wake her up? A quick check proves she’s fast asleep. For now.

He settles, his breathing and heart rate slowing, finding harmony with Hera’s gentle lifeforce. In a few minutes, he’s breathing in synchronicity with her, his mind floating, at peace.

_“Kanan?”_

He ignores the projection. He’s not even sure if Ezra knows he’s doing it. His apprentice can deal with whatever it is for an hour.

_Kanan!_

With a mental growl, he sends back, _Some of us are trying to rest, Ezra! Leave us alone!_ He feels a jump of surprise on the other end. Ezra definitely didn’t know what he was doing. The link blinks out.

But now Kanan’s good and annoyed. He climbs to his feet, and heads out of the room again, setting the combo lock. He quickly finds each member of the crew, giving them a terse order. “Common room, now.”

Once he has them all together—Zeb, Sabine, Ezra, and even Chopper—he sits them down in front of him. “Did I, or did I not tell you that Hera needs to sleep while we’re in hyperspace transit?”

They tumble over each other with excuses. “Yeah, but I—” / “I didn’t think it would—” / “It was you, actually—”

Frustration boiling over, he waves a hand through the air across their faces. “You will stop.”

Together they all say, “I will stop.” Their eyes are suddenly glazed over and staring sightlessly at him. Chopper's dome rotates back and forth, confused.

Kanan blinks. Did he just—?

He tests it again. With a wave, he says, “You will leave Hera alone.”

“I will leave Hera alone.” 

Huh. He hadn’t meant to, but somehow he’d coerced them by accident. He feels a pang of guilt and lifts his hand to reverse it—

—then thinks again. He waves his hand. “Unless it’s life and death.”

“Unless it’s life and death.”

“Go about your business.” Like a band snapping, they all rise and head off in different directions. 

Except Chopper. He twitters at Kanan for a moment, the tone rising in query.

Kanan turns a considering eye on the droid. “Maybe you’re not susceptible to that, but I can always turn you off…”

Chopper squeals and rolls away at high speed.

He’s coming through the door into Hera’s quarters again, when she opens her eyes. “Is something wrong?” she asks sleepily.

“No, just a crew with no idea how to occupy themselves.” 

She chuckles. “As usual.”

“Go back to sleep,” he tells her gently. She smiles back, eyes staying open, and he starts to lift his hand… No. _Danger that way lies,_ he hears in his head. His hand comes back down.

And her eyes close all on their own. She turns over, and her breathing becomes regular again. Padding over with quiet steps, he bends down to give her a light kiss on the forehead, just at the base of one of her lekku. “Pleasant dreams, my love.”

And this time, neither his meditation nor her rest is disturbed.


End file.
